Google search was leaps and bounds better than any other search engine when it came along and dominated. Yahoo couldn’t build their own, and nobody else they could buy from compared.

As i understand it, no LLM is miles ahead of the others right now, especially when it comes to simple agentic stuff. Hell, Qwen3.6-35B-A3 quantized to 3bits running on an 8 year old consumer GPU handles most agentic stuff fine, if a bit slow.

Differences in LLMs boil down to mostly the harness and the compute to run the models. Even for high complexity tasks like coding, the differences between openai, anthropic, google, and the bigger qwen models aren’t that dramatic.

We’re clearly in a different situation at the moment. Google is far from the only useful back end language model provider.

iPhone is a hardware and Apple is a hardware company. So the 'skin' they sell is much more valuable than Yahoo.